The Temptation of Mitt

If he goes all out for Iowa, the nomination could quickly be his. But is it like Lucy and the football?

Mitt Romney made a trip to Iowa in October, and that in itself was news, for this was just the third time in 2011 that the Republican front-runner had set foot in the state whose caucuses quadrennially kick off the presidential-nomination contest. Romney’s absence has been duly (and irritatedly) noted by Iowan GOPers, who, like their opposite numbers on the Democratic side, have come to expect a grotesque degree of obeisanceand obsequiousness from their party’s wannabe nominees. At a town-hall meeting in Sioux City, one voter asked Romney if he now planned to spend more time courting caucusgoers—if, that is, the silly man had finally come to his senses. “I’m in Iowa,” Romney replied, displaying a GPS level of precision and acuity regarding his geolocation. “I will be here again and again, campaigning here … I’d love to win Iowa.”

To some observers, the accoutrement of Romney’s visit—including leaflets, with pictures of him cavorting at the Iowa State Fair, that called on Washington to practice fiscal prudence “just like we do in Des Moines”—suggested just that. But there were other signs to the contrary: his rejection of a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, ardently supported by the Christian conservatives who dominate the caucuses, in favor of “let[ting] the states create their own legislation with regard to life”; his repeated, and even more sacrilegious, statements opposing the extension of federal ethanol subsidies scheduled to expire in December.

These mixed signals are neither incidental nor accidental. They’re reflective of a deep ambivalence in Romneyworld about its approach to the Hawkeye State. All year long, the campaign has debated internally whether and how hard to compete in the caucuses. Every option carries both significant upsides and substantial risks. But now, with the voting in Iowa just two months away, decision time is here. The choice Romney makes in the days ahead may radically alter the dynamics and outcome of the race—and tell us something vital about the kind of candidate he has become.

The ambivalence toward Iowa on Team Romney is rooted in a history at once recent and terrifically traumatic. In 2008, the former Massachusetts governor spent more than $10 million on the caucuses, blanketing the airwaves with more than 8,000 ads and deploying an army of organizers—on the theory that if he could pull off a victory and then repeat the feat a few days later in New Hampshire, where he had led in the polls for much of 2007, he could effectively pocket the nomination before his rivals even knew what hit them.

But, of course, it was not to be. Instead, Romney was beaten—beaten bloody, beaten senseless—in Iowa by Mike Huckabee, who spent virtually nothing and yet still came away with a stunning nine-point triumph. The loss was humiliating for Romney; moreover, it was crippling. Limping into New Hampshire, he was soundly thumped there by John McCain, and that was pretty much all she wrote.

No surprise, then, that this time around the Romney campaign has pursued a dramatically different strategy in Iowa: a rigorous minimalism replacing the balls-out maximalism of four years ago. In addition to the paucity of in-person visits, Romney has aired no TV ads; declined to participate in the straw poll in August; failed to show up for another major Iowa event (the Faith & Freedom Coalition dinner) last month and will forgo yet another (the state GOP’s annual Ronald Reagan Dinner) this Friday; and employs just a skeleton staff of five (a senior strategist, a state director, and three field staffers). His campaign’s message to Iowa, in other words, hasn’t quite been “Drop dead,” but no one could remotely mistake it for “Let’s roll,” either.

Yet despite all this, Romney is running at or near the top of the field in Iowa. According to a CNN-Time poll conducted last week, he is in the lead with 24 percent, followed by Herman Cain with 21, Ron Paul with 12, and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry with 10 each. And while other recent surveys have put him somewhere between seven and twelve points behind Cain, the strong suspicion among Republican operatives in the state is that the Hermanator’s support may well suffer the same fate as that of the supernovas—Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry—who preceded him atop the polls only to collapse later, especially after Cain’s incoherent waffling on abortion.

Thus is the situation in Iowa—apparently, potentially—presenting Romney with an unexpected and golden opportunity. With social conservatives split among a handful of candidates, including Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich as well as Perry and Bachmann, a last-­minute burst of organizing and advertising might allow the national front-runner to steal a victory in the caucuses. And if he did, Romney would then be poised to execute the plan that tanked him in 2008: a one-two punch of wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he is far ahead right now, that would probably amount to a knockout blow to Perry, the only candidate in the Republican bunch with the financial wherewithal to wage an extended national primary campaign.